School Daze with The Holdovers

 I’m someone who has only a small degree of tolerance for Christmas music.  Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I used up my entire 2023 quota (“The Little Drummer Boy”! Baby Jesus songs!) watching The Holdovers. Not that this newest Alexander Payne film is all sweetness and light; Payne’s cynicism about the way folks cope with the human condition undercuts the saccharine nature of his score. But I’m still trying to decide how I feel about this latest entry in the boys-at-a-boarding-school genre. (Think Rushmore, The Dead Poet’s Society, A Separate Peace . . .) The reviewer at the New York Times adored The Holdovers, using it as a jumping off point for his own very mixed personal memories. The reviewer at the Los Angeles Times hated it, accusing Payne of insincerity, and worse. Me? I found it appealing in its best moments and over-calculated in its worst. I liked these characters, but couldn’t bring myself to accept their reality.

 Paul Giamatti, who shone in Payne’s 2004 Sideways, is something of a specialist in playing morose men who can’t quite accommodate to their own time and place. Somewhat like the late Wilford Brimley, he seems never to have been young. As a hapless wine connoisseur in Sideways, he came off as emphatically middle-aged when he was still in his thirties. Now he’s aged into the role of a longtime teacher of ancient history at a tony New England prep school where most of the boys (in their jackets and ties and floppy 1970s hair) have grown up expecting winter-break Caribbean vacations and easy coasting into Ivy League colleges. (Giamatti, the son of a former president of Yale who later became the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, has had his own prep school experience, so he knows the drill.) In The Holdovers he’s fitted out with a cutting wit, a secret sorrow, and a series of small physical afflictions that make him unpleasant company to just about everyone. There is about him from the start, though, a quiet sweetness that I wasn’t expecting, especially in his treatment of the campus’s few women.

 One of them, Mary Lamb, is the head of the school’s  cooking staff.  Like Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, she’s stuck on campus during winter break. And she too has a sorrow, though it’s hardly a secret: her only child, a highly promising graduate of the school, has just been killed in Vietnam. As movingly played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Mary is both sweet and sour: happily, the script doesn’t allow her to be merely a sad-faced bereaved mom. The Vietnam angle does take us by surprise, because there’s little sense that this story is set back in time. But perhaps that’s accurate: on this campus, among these well-parented young men, an overseas war is hardly top of mind. Hell, no—they have no intention of going . . . and their parents will see that their draft boards stay far, far away.

The third member of the trio left behind at Christmas is a first-time movie actor who makes an impressive debut here. Dominic Sessa, an actual prep school grad (class of ’22) plays the classic smart but angry kid with no friends and no family to rely on. Naturally, he and Mr. Hunham develop a prickly but unmistakable bond, one that will take an unexpected turn late in the film. I’m a bit Scrooge-ish about the outcome, but Payne’s sympathy for the walking wounded remains very much intact. (There’s one more such character in the film that I deliberately haven’t mentioned, but suffice it to say that Payne is very well-named.)

 

Tripping My Way Through “Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance”

“Nice” doesn’t make you famous. It doesn’t sell copies of magazines or get you invited to appear on TV talk shows. Ron Howard, for one, has spent much of his adult  career dodging the accusation that he’s merely a nice guy. But Paula Broussard and Lisa Royère have devoted their first biography to a woman who balanced star power with a personal graciousness that made her a joy to be around. They should know. When That’s Entertainment introduced them to Eleanor Powell (who starred in glossy MGM musicals from 1936 to 1943), the two fell in love with her spectacularly athletic tap-dancing. Dance-mad themselves, they managed to befriend the long-retired Powell, and were charmed by her friendly and upbeat manner. And yet their dream of compiling a pictorial guide to Powell’s films was put on hold for decades. It was the pandemic that revived the project, which then evolved into a fully-researched new biography, Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance.

 Powell’s early life, we learn, was not an easy one. Raised in tight circumstances by a single mother, she discovered in dance a way to overcome her shyness.  At an early age she made it to the Broadway stage as a variety performer.  Though she first specialized in ballet and acrobatics, she eventually learned to tap, and this became her springboard to Hollywood. Before reading Born to Dance I had never considered the importance of tap-dancing in early Hollywood musicals. In the decade after sound entered the picture, audiences thrilled to the rhythmic clatter of tap shoes on a soundstage floor. In a series of Broadway Melody films, as well as such starring vehicles as Rosalie, Honolulu, and Born to Dance, Powell thrilled audiences with bravura production numbers (like dancing down a series of oversized drums) while also performing romantic duets with the likes of James Stewart and Robert Taylor.

 Of course audiences clamored for her to be paired with the greatest of male ballroom dancers, Fred Astaire. According to Broussard and Royère, the self-critical Astaire resisted for quite a while the opportunity to be her dance partner. Finally it happened. In Broadway Melody of 1940, a sentimental tale of two hoofers and the woman who comes between them, they wowed audiences with  Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” in what has been called the greatest tap sequence in the history of Hollywood. Performed on an elaborate mirrored set, it begins with a mood of Latin elegance, then shifts midway through into joyous jazz.  Alas, though audiences hoped for an encore, it was not to be. Amazingly, Astaire was intimidated by her powerful tap skills, saying that “I had twenty-nine partners, but I met my match with Ellie.” 

 The end of her partnership with Astaire was not the only disappointment in Eleanor’s life. Tastes in entertainment changed, and she faced some health challenges. Her one stab at matrimony ended in disaster: husband Glenn Ford turned out to be a compulsive womanizer, and one who also stepped out with men. When they finally divorced, he proved himself a cad about finances, and she was too ladylike to object. Needing to raise son Peter on her own, she courageously resurrected her career as a nightclub entertainer after years of devoting herself solely to the domestic realm.  Through it all, a strong religious faith kept her sane.

 One truly admirable thing about Eleanor: she refused to accept skin color as a barrier to friendship. She and the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson shared routines; Robinson and Pearl Bailey were honorary godparents to her son. A lovely lady, in every sense of the word. Brava!

 

 

 

 

Joe Mankiewicz Sticks His Finger in “The Honey Pot”

The Mankiewicz brothers were genuine Hollywood legends.  Elder brother Herman co-wrote Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and literally hundreds of other classic films, starting in 1926 and ending not long before his early death in 1953. But Herman was something of an underachiever compared to younger brother Joseph. Joe (1909-1993) is credited with writing almost 40 films, and directing 22. In 1950-1951 he achieved the remarkable feat of winning four Oscars, two for directing and writing the adapted screenplay of A Letter to Three Wives, and two more for writing and directing All About Eve. He nabbed his last Oscar nomination in 1973 for directing his last film, Sleuth. (The expert in all this is my colleague Sydney Ladensohn Stern, for her fascinating 2019 study, The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics.)

 It was near the end of Joe Mankiewicz's fabulous career—which also included everything from the notorious Cleopatra to a documentary on Martin Luther King—that he wrote and directed 1967’s The Honey Pot. This dark-hued farce, set in a Venice palazzo, has some of the qualities demonstrated by  Rian Johnson in 2019’s Knives Out. In both there’s a lavishly decorated set, a cluster of mismatched people, and more than a whiff of murder most foul. Knives Out boasts, along with a lot of clever business, a subtle and highly amusing Stephen Sondheim joke. The Honey Pot is even more esoteric, basing its plot on Ben Jonson’s black comedy from 1605, Volpone. As a true English major, Mankiewicz clearly enjoyed esoteric references to his source material. His leading character’s surname, Fox, is a clear nod to the “sly fox” of Volpone’s English translation. And Fox’s henchman (Mosca in the original) is now William McFly. (Get it?)

 The crafty Fox is played to perfection by frequent Mankiewicz star Rex Harrison. I’ve heard obnoxious stories about the real-life Harrison, but in this film he’s delightfully devious. (Serious hilarity comes from the fact that, as a man obsessed with ballet, he madly pirouettes around his home to endless repetitions of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Yes, that’s the piece to which the hippos cavort in Disney’s Fantasia.)  Other major players include Cliff Robertson as the sidekick Fox recruits for his nefarious schemes, as well as the salty Susan Hayward,  the elegant Capucine, and the brassy Edie Adams, all of them playing former loves who are tricked into appearing at Fox’s fake deathbed in hopes of inheriting his fortune. I need a separate mention for Maggie Smith, who also takes part in the macabre festivities, in the role of Hayward’s rather prim and veddy British nurse and companion. In 1967, Smith was not brand-new to films. But she was hardly the legendary dowager she has since become in such productions as Gosford Park and TV’s Downton Abbey. In her early 30s, she was a pretty and rather vulnerable-looking redhead, one who had just received an Oscar nomination for playing Desdemona opposite a blackfaced (but highly impressive) Laurence Olivier in a filmed version of Othello. Her role in The Honey Pot seems modest at first, but proves to have hidden depths that take us by surprise. Her scenes of give-and-take with Harrison, in which she plays the innocent and he offers a nicely ironic disquisition on the passage of time, are at the heart of this film.

 

But all is not perfection. Along with the movie’s wit and such inspired moments as the crafty local police detective watching TV’s Perry Mason dubbed into Italian, there are key plot strands that simply make no sense. Maybe that’s part of the joke too.